The Ayers file

Megyn Kelly is airing her interview of former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers on her FOX News show. Ayers is the former Weather Underground terrorist and, as we all learned in 2008, former intimate ally of Obama in Chicago. If American voters didn’t get a handle on Obama in 2008, it wasn’t for lack of information in the public domain.

The first two segments of Kelly’s interview of Ayers aired last night; the first segment is below. Both of the two Ayers segments and a third segment with bombing victim John Murtagh are posted here. There is more tonight.

It is incredibly difficult to watch Ayers speak and even more difficult for an interviewer to extract the truth from him. The purpose of this post is to remind readers of David Horowitz’s excellent work on Ayers over the years. David interviewed Ayers for the essay that became chapter 2 of Destructive Generation (written with Peter Collier), on the rise and fall of the Weather Underground. David drew on his interview of Ayers for “Allies in War,” a column he published in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In a stroke of perfect timing, the New York Times had chosen on that date to celebrate Ayers in connection with the publication of Ayers’s memoir of his days as a terrorist on the lam. Here is how David concluded his 2011 essay:

I interviewed Ayers ten years ago, in a kindergarten classroom in uptown Manhattan where he was employed to shape the minds of inner city children. Dressed in bib overalls with golden curls rolling below his ears, Ayers reviewed his activities as a terrorist for my tape recorder. When he was done, he broke into a broad, Jack Horner grin and summed up his experience: “Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.”

In my experience, what drives most radicals are passions of resentment, envy and inner rage. Bill Ayers is a scion of wealth. His father was head of Detroit’s giant utility Commonwealth Edison, in line for a cabinet position in the Nixon Administration before his son ruined it by going on a rampage that to this day he cannot explain to any reasonable person’s satisfaction (which is why he has to conceal so much). It could be said of Bill Ayers that he was consumed by angers so terrible they led him to destroy his father’s career. But in the 10 hours I interviewed him I saw none of it. What I saw was a shallowness beyond conception. All the Weather leaders I interviewed shared a similar vacuity. They were living inside a utopian fantasy, a separate reality, and had no idea of what they had done. Nor any way to measure it. Appreciating the nation to which they were born, recognizing the great gifts of freedom and opportunity their parents and communities had given them, distinguishing between right and wrong – it was all above their mental and moral ceiling.

In the days ahead, this is one of the dangers we face.

As we have entered what David referred to in 2001 as “the days ahead,” we have learned that he could not have been more right.